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Financial News for the Rest of Us

WILL readers of The New York Times in print get less because The Times must invest to compete for readers and advertisers in the digital medium?

The DealBook business news product may offer an early indication. DealBook, which was greatly expanded last fall, is a prominent presence on NYTimes.com, offering up-to-the-minute news and trivia about Wall Street deals, regulatory issues, venture capital and personalities. In print, meanwhile, it owns a half-page inside Business Day four days a week — a much lower profile than online.

DealBook was created 10 years ago by Andrew Ross Sorkin as an e-mail newsletter, but as Sorkin’s star rose because of his mergers-and-acquisitions scoops, DealBook became a centerpiece of The Times’s Wall Street coverage.

We can all remember what things were like before 2008: Wall Street was king, New York was the center of the financial universe, the titans of finance were gods. DealBook’s offerings remain closely aligned with that paradigm, even though the titans have lost their shine, markets have been shifting away from New York, and the postcrash world is determined far more than before by China and the broader global economy.

Leon D. Black, the superrich head of Apollo Global Management, staged an over-the-top 60th birthday party for himself in the Hamptons, and on Aug. 18 DealBook chronicled it microscopically. The article included an element of finger-wagging about the excesses involved but still made sure that no detail-hungry, celebrity-starved reader was left behind.

It’s true that, within DealBook’s range of targeted topics, it delivers some hard-hitting material. And when big news in the deal world breaks, DealBook serves as a “real-time SWAT team,” in Mr. Sorkin’s words. Its coverage Aug. 15 of Google’s bid to acquire Motorola was wall to wall and, no question, served a broad readership’s desire to understand what this might mean for Google and its quest to exploit mobile technology.

New signs of systemic disease emerged that week, particularly in Europe, where the European Central Bank rushed to shore up Italian sovereign debt. Although DealBook ran a couple of columns calling attention to this threat, the developments made clearer that this subject requires in-depth investigating of a complex ecosystem whose inner workings may be just as opaque as the derivatives-larded American banking network that imploded in 2008.

Dean Starkman, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who runs the blog The Audit for The Columbia Journalism Review, shares my concerns that DealBook, while it helps The Times build a niche audience online, isn’t designed to address broader issues like this.

“DealBook is a symptom of, as well as a cause of, narrowing of the frames of business news,” he said. “What DealBook does is approach business and finance strictly from an investor’s perspective. This is useful, of course, and has deep roots in business press DNA. But it is not public interest journalism.”

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Rather, he added, this kind of journalism is good at scoops and incremental news developments. What readers require to understand deep crises like European debt is something else. “Somebody is going to have to step up and look at things systemically,” he said. “If the financial crisis has taught us anything it is that the investor’s perspective of looking at finance is too narrow.”

The Times’s DealBook expansion is a strategy for capturing digital readers interested in this narrowly defined perspective. Larry Ingrassia, the Business Day editor, told me that while in print The Times can succeed by broadly addressing “the five or 10 most important things you need to know,” the Web demands narrower and deeper offerings.

“If we don’t provide readers with some specialized content that informs them in an area where they might have a narrower and high interest,” he said, “somebody else is going to do it.”

The Times sacrificed no existing resources when it decided to enlarge DealBook, Mr. Ingrassia emphasized. Granting that, I worry that the investment meant forgoing an opportunity to strengthen reporting elsewhere.

One area in need now, in the business news category, is clearly the deepening hole in Europe. In slow motion, the weaker states of the European Union are sliding toward insolvency and the European banks, which hold their debt, are being pulled along.

Mr. Ingrassia said he didn’t think The Times’s coverage “has wanted from the lack of people,” and I would agree that Business Day, with support from foreign desk and International Herald Tribune reporters, has done a creditable job of covering developments in the crisis, especially the political angles relating to Europe’s leaders. Yet much remains invisible to interested readers.

Just as the 2008 crisis was largely explained after the fact by The Times and other publications, the current situation feels like a replay in which we may learn only later how the tumbling dominoes were arrayed. Perhaps most important to Times readers, little is being written about the consequences that a catastrophic event in Europe could have on the United States and the world economy.

Perhaps The Times will yet jump in and expose the linkages between Europe’s institutions and the American economy and markets — before the other shoe drops. But the focus of DealBook, tied as it is to The Times’s online strategy, isn’t pointed in that direction. And I have to wonder whether investing in this kind of journalism, even if it had meant forgoing DealBook’s granular devotion to its niche, wouldn’t have better served the public.